tribes scholar, and the development of an Incan ten tribes identity. In the
United States, President Thomas Jefferson found it necessary to issue a ruling
that the Indians were not the ten lost tribes, though some of his closest
associates, such as Elias Boudinot, passionately believed that they were. The
theory was potent and seductive. Boudinot was not the only American promi-
nent leader to believe in the Jewish Indian Theory. Already in 1682 William
Penn ( 1644 – 1718 ), wrote about the Indians: “As to the original of this extraor-
dinary people, I cannot but believe they are of the Jewish race, I mean of the
stock of the ten tribes so long lost;... The ten tribes were to go to a land‘not
planted nor known,’which certainly Asia, Africa, and Europewere.”^35
The Jewish Indian theory was attached to two critical questions. The first is
the familiar “where are the ten tribes?” The second was far more important at
the time: “how had humans arrived in America to begin with?” “There was a
problem accounting for who [the Indians] were and where they came from. If
everyone on the surface of earth [were] the descendants of Adam and Eve and
the seven survivors of the flood, then the Indians had to be connected to the
Biblical world.”^36 This charge became particularly acute after the May 1537
encyclical “Sublimus Deus” by Pope Paul III ( 1468 – 1549 ). Addressing the
question of the enslavement of the Native Americans, the pope stated that
they “and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians” were
“truly men.”^37 But what men were they? To be sure, the early modern period
was imbued with theories about the origins of different recently discovered
races. Yet the ten tribes theory was certainly the most persistent among them.^38
The Jewish Indian theory raised other questions that are still much over-
looked, which revolve around the theological and geographical aspects of the
horizon of possibility that the ten tribes posed in the Americas. Why was it so
important during the early modern period to find the tribes? And if they were
to be found in the Americas, how did they get there in the first place?
The Nordification of the Ten Tribes
In 1544 , Arzareth, the land of the ten lost tribes, made its first appearance on a
map, a small woodblock entitled “Asia wie es Jetziger Zeit” (Asia in Current Time;
see figure 5. 1 ) prepared by the German cartographer Sebastian Mu ̈nster ( 1488 –
1552 ). Listing it as “Arsare[t],” Mu ̈nster located it in the northeasternmost corner
of Asia, south of the Scythian Sea (Mare Scythivm). The broader region within
which it appeared is part of a peninsula surrounded by seas to the north and the
east, and separated from the rest of Asia by a wide river to its west. China is
positioned to the south of this peninsula.^39 Mu ̈nster—a theologian, cartographer,